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Reinventing the modern workplace
Enterprise 2.0 case studies are hard to find, so I pay attention whenever someone posts interesting findings on the Internet. Jack Vinson published his notes on social bookmarking in the enterprise talk given by Laurie Damianos of MITRE at the Boston KM conference. It’s worth a read. From the study:
“Many of the terms used by users are not in the official taxonomy, and work is underway to expand the formal taxonomy to represent things according to how people expect to find them.”
A corporate taxonomy based on what actually happens, instead of what is supposed to happen?
That could be useful…
Astronomers and physicists have a big problem on their hands: the universe. Cosmology has developed and discarded many models for how the universe works over the years, but our current model has a hole in it. A very dark hole.
Scientists have discovered that there is more matter in the universe than they can see. There just aren’t enough stars, planets, gas and dust to hold galaxies together. Physicists call this missing matter “Dark Matter”, because gravity indicates that something should be there, but it isn’t directly observable.
This is kind of like writing “Here be Dragons” on an old map. The term “Dark Matter” is really nothing more than a pointer to our current levels of ignorance.
I was drawn to look up all this fascinating physics stuff on Wikipedia, because for a while now I’ve been discussing “Dark Matter” as it pertains to enterprise information.
It’s hard to guess exactly how much data is dark in a typical business. You can’t know how much you don’t know, after all. But a recent AIIM study showed that 69% of people believe that less than 50% of their organization’s information is searchable online.
With all the effort being put into implementing collaboration, ECM and social media tools, you’d think someone would worry about the fact that we’re missing more than half the information we need.
And that’s merely the searchable stuff. The picture gets worse if we want to analyze or secure that information. A 2005 AIIM presentation prepared by Doculabs suggests that 80% of organizational information is unstructured and 90% of this remains unmanaged.
So every organization has a huge amount of unstructured, tacit information lying around, beyond the reach of their IT systems. This is the Dark Matter of the enterprise. And while content management vendors spout statistics about how effective information management can improve productivity and effectiveness, the vast majority of the information is still out there somewhere — unsearchable, unfindable and unknown.
We don’t have a searching problem. What we have is a data collection problem.
There’s a vast amount of Dark Matter holding our organizations together. But we know very little about it today.
Dragons indeed.
While browsing the feed from Content Management Connection, I noticed that Oscar Berg re-blogged David Wineberger‘s notes on the nature of openness taken at a seminar given by James Boyle.
The gist of the talk (and the notes) is that people routinely overestimate the risks of transparency and undervalue the benefits of openness. It’s a hard habit to break. We assume that increased control will lead to increased security. But there are situations where the reverse is true.
Which is more secure from a group of second-graders: A cookie in plain view on the breakfast table or one in a ceramic jar on the kitchen counter?
Psychologists have done this experiment. The cookie lying out in the open is the most secure. Everyone can see if it’s missing or if someone took a bite out of it. If one of the kids takes it all the others will know — and at least one will probably tattle. Only if all the children work together can they get the cookie and get away with it. That requires the children to work together closely and divide the spoils fairly.
The cookie in the jar is actually less secure because any one of the children might be able to sneak it without the others knowing. (And now you know why most jars of candy are clear glass or plastic!)
The same logic that drives the cookie experiment is the logic that makes sunshine laws, open source software, and Wikipedia work.
Security is often the first concern raised by organizations implementing collaboration tools. But openness can actually lead to better security.
I was just looking at a chart from Dr. Todd Stephens- an Enterprise 2.0 Blueprint:
For some reason, staring at this pretty colored chart made me quite cross. Not because the information in it was wrong or misleading. It was because this chart takes a scientific management-style approach to Enterprise 2.0. It prescribes the areas in the enterprise that you should consider when you try to pitch your Enterprise 2.0 business case. It aspires to be a guideline for building a “best practice process manual” to follow when your pitch succeeds.
Imagine you took an anthill, removed every ant, set them carefully aside, and then completely demolished the anthill. Then you brought all the ants back and let them rebuild their anthill again. Would you have EXACTLY the same anthill as you did before?
I haven’t done that exact experiment, so I don’t know for sure, but when I shook my plastic ant farm as a kid, tunnels collapsed and ants scurried about. I’d imagine that the big feature on the Ant Nightly News was about the giant earthquake. Then I’d watch them start digging. After a few days, a new system of tunnels would appear. Life in the colony moved on. (Until the next big quake, of course.)
Studying the way that ants construct their colonies is fascinating. There was lots of room for me, as a 5-year old staring into a plastic ant farm, to speculate exactly what those chambers were for, and why the tunnels ran the way that they did. I couldn’t spot an ant architect with a tiny blueprint, yet somehow they knew what to do. It’s instinct, I guess.
We humans have instincts, too. We’re naturally good at things like communicating and forming groups. We’re so good at it, we often don’t notice it happening.
When humans collaborate, we don’t build anthills. We build companies, and non-profit groups, and clubs and teams and associations and governments. These artifacts are what we refer to as “Enterprises”. Much like a colony of ants, enterprises are motivated by a handful of basic goals: resource gathering, manufacturing, growth, survival, etc. Those goals, along with the aggregated interactions of thousands of ants, result in interesting arrangements of tunnels. Shaking things up a bit will produce a different pattern of excavations even though neither the ants nor the goals have changed.
Corporate structure and processes often emerge in the same way as those tunnels. They can seem convoluted, inefficient, and sometimes just plain weird at times. It’s the legacy of thousands of small tactical decisions taken by workers each day. Enterprises are organic, just like anthills.
While looking at the existing structures of an enterprise is fascinating, I’m not sure it helps you plan the next tunnel. I believe that Enterprise 2.0 can improve a company’s tactical operations by better informing knowledge workers. Better informed employees can make better decisions — hopefully ones that lead to the emergence of a more productive enterprise. But I also know that I’d have a difficult time connecting an enterprise instant messaging client roll-out to the company’s bottom line in the same way that I’d have a tough time connecting two ants waving their antennae at each other to the construction of an anthill.
And if it’s tough to follow that chain of events, imagine how difficult it is to reverse engineer an anthill. When I see a colorful, complicated chart like the one above, I picture an ant with a clipboard and stopwatch, shouting, “Hey guys, wait a sec. Let’s plan these tunnels this time.”
A tunnels-first approach in the social world only leads to frustration. You’ve got to get the myriad interactions between the ants right first. Then the tunnels will work themselves out.
As Nate says in between mouthfuls of hummus,
One of the biggest battles I see beginning to rage is the push to have E2 implementations matter to “Corporate”. To me that doesn’t make any sense. Sure, they need to understand the benefits, but they should also understand that their benefits are byproducts of user benefits. These things work because of users. Not a mandate from Corporate. So focus on defining their value, and their value alone.
Pie has a great post musing about the origins and ultimate purpose for Enterprise 2.0. I’ve been thinking about it myself. And as we get closer to getting ready to ship, I think I might be feeling brave enough to try to field an answer to this question…
Previous enterprise solutions tried to solve the problem at a high level. Enterprise 1.0 was defined by expensive, broadly defined solutions whose use was mandated by the top of the org chart. I’m certain that this approach fails because it doesn’t take into account the actual problems of the average knowledge worker.
I think that’s why we have Enterprise 2.0.
Structural holes and the spaces between them are fascinating, but they amount to little more than an academic distraction. I have a lot of respect for folks like Mark and Bex because they are both brilliant thinkers. But somehow I can’t imagine them sitting down with Lisa from Accounting to explain how “the holes between non-redundant contacts provide you with opportunities that can enhance the control benefits and the information benefits of your network!”
Well of course not. Those kinds of things aren’t important to people doing the work. They’re interesting to Enterprise Architects. My point is that we’re drifting far, far away from the actual problems here. We’re back in the same sort of abstract thinking that led to 1.0 solutions. Enterprises are made of people.
The way I see it, as far as ‘knowledge’ is concerned, there are only really two important things to your average information worker: discovery and contribution.
Discovery
Discovery is just that — knowing what you didn’t know before. Common workplace discovery problems are things like “Who knows about this vendor/partner/account?” or “Who was the guy we talked to about that thing?” Enterprise 1.0 tried to address this by mandating a central repository and hierarchical classification system. It forced employees to tell some computer system what they knew and how they knew it. Only after a lot of manual data entry would the system be able to tell them something in return.
This approach failed because knowledge workers couldn’t be bothered. There was too much up-front work to make the search results useful. Without useful search results, nobody wanted to use the system. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Instead, knowledge workers would just ask someone who knew rather than working with a difficult computer and move on. You simply can’t turn your workforce into programmers, historians or archivists. There’s work to be done.
Google changed our way of thinking about discovery. It’s not a filing problem any more. It’s an indexing problem. The problem isn’t that content has been put on the wrong shelf — the problem is the shelves themselves. Digital information doesn’t occupy space and it can be duplicated with perfect fidelity. The strategies for managing a physical library are different than managing a virtual one. Web 2.0 taught us that reckless capture and rigorous indexing can solve discovery problems with much more success.
Contribution
Contribution problems precede discovery problems. How do people add what they know to the organization’s collective memory? How do they get credit for their work? Most knowledge workers are altruistic, but they both want the organization to benefit from their contribution and to recognize their effort.
When I was working in ECM, I used to joke about the “seven-second window.” That’s the period of time between a user finishing a piece of work and moving on to the next task. That window is the length of time users will devote to figuring out where to put content and how to share it. Do I send an email? What folder on the share drive do I use? If you can’t capture the necessary metadata within that seven seconds of “Hmmm. Where should I put this?” then you lose. The system won’t work. People are too busy.
I’m not sure that Enterprise 2.0 has really woken up to the importance of “Contribution Engines”. I define a contribution engine as a tool that automatically captures an employee’s output, indexes it for later retrieval, and shares it with others in the group. Sam Lawrence is looking for a contribution engine when he talks about Attention. But solving the contribution problem is huge. If we could find a way to allow people to contribute to knowledge bases just by doing what they do, then we have the “2.0″ — a solution that’s perfectly aligned with the goals of the individual worker.
Automatic contribution. Instant discovery. Those things will make enterprises work better, because they make people work better.
And I think “working better” is the real point.